Routing research at CAIDA pursues discovery of new paradigms for
interdomain routing algorithms and protocols. We seek to collect
and analyze the best available Internet topology and routing data
to support Internet topology modeling and simulation.

Network routing research and its theoretical results apply to many domains
such as computer science, physics, mathematics, economics, social and
political sciences. CAIDA's routing research currently focuses on applying
key theoretical results in distributed computation theory to the development
of protocols that will address issues of future Internet scalability.

Compact routing is the routing theory that studies the fundamental limits for routing efficiency, and tries to construct routing algorithms that meet those limits.
Measures of routing efficiency include the routing table size, routing path stretch, and communication overhead, often estimated by the number of messages required for the algorithm to converge upon a network topology change. The global network topology knowledge is usually assumed, and all the efficiency parameters are estimated in the worst case, across all possible network topologies on which the routing algorithm correctly operates.

The most pessimistic fact from this theory is that there can exist no routing algorithm that would be able to converge with the number of control messages growing slower than linearly with the network size in the worst case. The most pessimistic finding in this paper is that the small-world topologies are this worst case. Almost all complex network topologies, including the Internet, are small-world: the average shortest path length in them grows (sub)logarithmically with the network size.

Originally developed at MIT ANA, the Spoofer project to assess
macroscopic trends in IPv4 source address filtering, e.g., of private or
bogon addresses, which should not be exiting appropriately configured networks.

Our data collection efforts support the scientific Internet research
community in the process of validating their models, simulations,
or theories. The following CAIDA datasets are available for researchers.